Whole brain radiotherapy for brain metastases from breast cancer: estimation of survival using two stratification systems
Discussion
Whole brain radiotherapy has traditionally been the standard treatment for patients with brain metastases since 1950. WBRT has been shown to effectively improve neurologic symptoms and function for patients with minimum co-morbidity. Breast cancer is one of the malignant tumors that frequently metastasize to the brain [17]. Once a diagnosis of brain metastasis has been established, prognosis is generally poor [14,18]. In this cohort, the overall survival rate in one year was of 33% with a median survival time 6.4 months. We previously reported a series of 270 patients with brain metastases treated with WBRT alone with or without surgical resection and, in this series, the estimated median survival was 4.6 months [14].
